Contribute to a Public Good; Organize a Screening of “Honor Flight”

Most undergraduate economics majors learn that humans lack an incentive to contribute to so-called “public goods.” Experiments in the lab, however, show that this prediction of eliminatory theory doesn’t always describe real human behavior. Nor, as the late Elinor Ostrom showed, does it describe human behavior outside the lab. In the real world, it turns out that humans often do contribute to public goods.

These contributions are often facilitated by creative institutional arrangements. Kickstarter, for example, has allowed 2.5 million people to contribute over $350 million to creative projects. This year, people will voluntarily contribute more to the arts through Kickstarter than they will through the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts.

But let’s set aside numbers and theory. If you’d like to see a deeply moving example of how free people can come together to solve problems and do absolutely amazing things, see this movie.

I saw it this week and I can attest that it is one of the most powerful and moving films I have ever seen.